This website will give you information about art

Month: May 2018

I once knew of a lady who had her whole life before her. She had just graduated high school and she had been selected by a top college in the country. She was enjoying a nice summer day out on the lake. They had a platform where she was sunbathing in the middle of the water. She decided to jump in and take a swim. That was the last time she walked. She was paralyzed when she hit the bottom.

I remember reading a book about her. It was very inspiring. Completely paralyzed in a wheelchair, she never lost sight of life. Joni Eareckson Tada picked up a brush with her mouth and started painting. But while most people would paint images expressing a sense of loss in such a situation, Joni painted the most beautiful scenes of ocean views and horses in meadows. I guess her thoughts were focused on the fact that life had given her another chance and with that chance she chose to paint.

Today, she runs a ministry for others who are handicapped. No one has to pioneer themselves through the loss they have just experienced. Joni is there to help them. She shows them with her actions and through her words. But the one thing about her words, they aren’t false and they don’t lack understanding, which is a stumbling block for many people who suddenly find themselves in such a situation. Joni knows because she has been through it. People know that she can relate. Art was there to spark life back into her and now she in turn gives back. That’s a lesson we could all stand to learn.

When I first heard the story about Joni, I thought how original, such a miraculous story. When I started writing this article, I did a search on the net to remind myself of certain details. Joni is buried somewhere in the bottom of the pile because there are example after example of how artists have fought back from their own adversity. Artists who are paralyzed or challenged in some other way are practicing art and getting through life just fine.

To name a few, there’s Dennis Francesconi, an artist from Fresno, California who broke his neck and immediately became a quadriplegic as a result of a boat skiing accident. Then there’s Erin Brady Worsham, an artist who paintswith her eyebrows. She battles with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and she can neither move nor breathe on her own. But, wires taped to her eyebrows that connect to a keyboard on her wheelchair allow her to manipulate images on her computer screen. Her paintings take her about 250 hours worth of work, but they are beautiful. When art drives you, nothing can hold you back. Those are just a few of the miraculous artists pursuing their passions regardless of the adversities they face.

A few weeks ago, I highlighted the lives of Peggy Chun and Carlos Vargas in an article entitled “The Drive in Art.” They also found life through art after meeting with adversity. I don’t think it’s so much as people finding art through life. I think it’s a greater phenomenon than that. I think people are finding life through art.

Are you looking to add a personal touch for your house? Or maybe you have a large space with barren partitions and you’re looking for something inside the room to turn out to be a focal stage – something that displays somewhat little bit of who you might be.

Consider a significant canvas wall artwork print. Technological improvements have made it so you’ll be able to possess a virtual canvas masterpiece at a small fraction for the price of a long time gone by. With regards to sorts of canvas prints, you’ve a variety of selections. You may have a customized canvas print created from your picture. Or how about a pop artwork canvas print from your photograph?

They are terrific options for those who have the best image in thoughts (and it occurs to become a portrait), but what in the event you do not possess the time or photography abilities to go out and take that perfect sunset image you have in thoughts? Or what in the event you live within the Village inside the middle of Manhattan and adore driving over the Brooklyn Bridge and looking again at your New York Metropolis skyline – so a lot so that you’d like to have a great huge canvas print of that hung because the centerpiece of one’s fantastic space? Or what in the event you have your heart set on a big 3-piece canvas panoramic on the Rockies?

When you find your self in the comparable situation, you need to contemplate taking advantage of an on line canvas artwork superstore. Some location exactly where professional photographers have traveled the world and taken gorgeous pictures of everything from panoramic mountain photos to lushgardens and waterfalls to lovely sunsets over beaches and cityscapes. Some location exactly where those incredibly identical photos are then professionally “painted” on the 100% cotton canvas with a custom-made frame (or you may go the “gallery-wrap” route) for your canvas print.

How you can greatest come across these “canvas art superstores”? We’d suggest performing a Google look for goods for instance “canvas wall art” or, more specifically, “sunset canvas prints” or “mountain canvas prints” and so on…As soon as you have obtained your search results, just go to some of your shops and acquire the canvas printthat matches your desires and spending budget standards.

Block printing goes back a long way, even to China many thousands of years ago, but the material of choice then was wood. The work involved was time consuming, but modern materials have made the technique much easier. Lino can be cut with a knife but keeps its hard edges and surface texture, whereas wood blocks demand accurate carving and cutting with special tools and fine tuning with planes and smoothing paper. The smooth lino surface is perfect for creating the exact pattern the artist desires, even if they choose to texture it with tools to achieve a certain effect.

Two colour printing is possible with lino, but this needs more than one printapplication and the paint will need to dry between each stage. The accurate positioning of the various lino blocks both at the cutting stage and at the printing stage can be done with guides, to help with colour separation or mixing as the creative work demands.

Many people assume, wrongly, that lino printing is just for big bold areas of colour with no scope to create fine detail, however the most common use is for those blocky, statement-making prints you find regularly exhibited. It’s perfect for posters and abstract designs or comic characters, but the boundaries of what can be created with lino printing are determined by artistry and, to some extent, courage. After all, you only really get one opportunity to get it right (which makes you admire the skill of those who carved with wood blocks).

Lino printing requires only a few cheap tools, some materials and a suitable work surface. On top of that you’ll need suitable paint or ink and the lino, all available from art supplies stores in various sizes, thicknesses and hardnesses; lino can also come ready-mounted on wood. Designs can be drafted onto the lino blocks using standard pencils. There are also kits and starter packs providing everything you need.

Now all you need to do is create a design on the block and start working away. When you start to sketch out your design or image, make sure you look after the smooth face as that will determine the quality of your print. The next stage is cutting out the design or, in actual fact, removing everything but the image. Use the specially design cuttersfor this task, the larger ones for the rough cuts and the smaller ones for the fine detail. Don’t worry too much about the surface of the removed area as this will not be seen on the print. Layer some ink on a sheet of glass or other smooth surface and roll it out with the brayer until a smooth area is completely covered, then roll the paint onto your lino block going over it a few times to cover it. Finally, now take the lino block and press it firmly onto the printsurface, perhaps using a weight to help, then stand back and admire as you lift the block

Lino printing is a simple low-cost method to make repeated shapes or one-off works of art, and is suitable for children and adults alike. Remember that with this technique images are reversed so any text or characters will have to be created in mirror-style to work properly.

I came across KevsGraphics.com at exactly the right time! I was looking for something online to help me get my name personalised. I wanted some new artwork on the wall and I wanted it to be original and from the heart. I wanted people to come into my house, see the artwork and say “Wow, who drew that!?”

I saw on Kevin’s website that he will draw your name surrounding your interests and likes, and incorporate your name into it. So I started thinking about what I liked and what would look good down on paper. I’m into mystery and I love dragonflies. So I wrote and email to Kevin and asked him if that was going to be too difficult to do.

Almost five minutes later I received a response from Kevin. He said that no job was too hard and as soon as I submitted my order through the website, he would begin straight away! So I went through and placed my order and wrote the description again of what I wanted my drawing to look like.

I was thinking it would maybe be a week or so before I received my drawing, but just one day later I got an email from Kevin saying my drawing was completed and on it’s way to me in the mail! I couldn’t believe it! And sure enough, the next day, there was a parcel on my doorstep when I got home from work.

I went inside and opened it up and I was speechless. Kevin had designed such a beautiful and unique drawing and it reflected me perfectly. The quality of the drawing was just magnificent, such fine detail and you could tell that a lot of thought had gone into this drawing.

Kevin has been drawing for most of his life, around 40 years to be precise. His drawing still inspires me to this day and I can’t help but stare at it when I’m sitting in the lounge.

I would definitely recommend Kevin’s work to anyone who is looking to have something so sentimental and personal and creative hanging on the wall of their home. I even had Kevin do a name for a friend of mine for her birthday and she was so pleased with the quality and result of her drawing!

I asked Kevin if he wouldn’t mind posting the picture he did for me on his website, and sure enough, it’s up there, on Kev’s custom pencil drawings home page.

Oil paintings can be very hard-wearing; there are examples available of more than 500 years old oil paintings! But it’s not the paint itself that’s durable – it’s the specific way you apply it. Tubes of oil paint are raw ingredients. If you layer them incorrectly your painting will crumble and fall apart within a few years after completion. There are three major rules that make a oil paintings last the ages:

The rule “fat over lean” means that every following layer of oil paint has to be just a little bit fatter than the preceding one. In the first layer, you just paint with oil paints right out of the tube, and you make them thinner with turpentine. In the second layer, you add just a little bit of painting medium to the paint. In the third layer, you add a little bit more of medium to the paint etc. Oil painting medium can be prepared with stand oil and dammar varnish, mixed in equal amounts.

Thick Over Thin Oil Paintings

Thick layers of oil paint will take a longer time to dry than thin layers of oil paint. The drying process of oil paint doesn’t end when the paint is dry to the touch. And every time you paint a layer over that, it will form a layer. Thick film dries more slowly than thin films of oil paint. Faster drying film layers shrink faster than slower drying film layers. So, a thin layer of film painted over a thicker one, will crack in time. In oil painting, it is better to first work with thinner washes, merely coloring the surface, and includes texture later.

Fresh Paint

Oil paint forms a film when it dries. It dries in contact with oxygen. When the oil paint has already been exposed to air for more than a few hours (on your palette), you can still stir it and it may seem like you can still paint with it. But it the quality of film will decrease. When oil paint has partially dried, its ability to make one solid film is distorted, and it will peel off over time – long enough to fool you, but not long enough to satisfy the buyer of the painting. If you want to preserve leftovers of paint, carefully cover them with plastic foil and use them as soon as possible.

Oil Painting Durability

Durability depends a lot on the painting grounds you use. Canvas is supple, and dried gesso is much less flexible. There’s no record of the way oil paint behaves after a hundred years on gesso, because gesso is an acrylic material! It has only been there for a few decades. But it is believed that in time, the oil and gesso will separate from each other. We all know that acrylic and oil paint are two very different materials and even only because of the stiffness, gessoed canvases tend to crack in time.

You can avoid this cracking by gessoing your own canvases and adding some caseine to the gesso (or adding a thin layer of gesso to a ready-primed canvas). Caseine makes the gesso more elastic, and it aids the oil paint sticking on to the gesso. This is also a good reason to add caseine to the gesso when you set up a painting board.

When you glue your canvases the old fashioned way with hide-glue, make sure to use very, very thin glue. A too thick hide-glue layer causes problems (circle-shaped cracks). The same goes for acrylic binder (not too thick under layers, only a thin sizing to impermeate the canvas)
Most 20 century art will be gone in 50 years, owing to bad painting techniques. It will only be obtainable as a digital reproduction… Such problems really are preventable.

Where to Find Quality Oil Paintings for Sale

There are many oil painters who sell oil paintings for affordable prices. Whether or not their oil paintings will be around in 50 years is another matter altogether. That is why it is important that you purchase oil paintings from qualified artists who use the best quality oil paints and oil painting techniques. This way you will be able to keep your oil paintings and pass them from generation to generation!

Looking across the spectrum of wildlife artists throughout the world today, it is hard to know which may be the most lucrative investment. Most art collectorspurchase their paintings primarily for the pleasure of seeing it on the wall, but of course it is always nice to know that a particular painting has held it’s value, or even more exciting, it has increased in price.

Unfortunately just a very few artists will achieve international acknowledgement. Whilst a lot of artists are professional and produce exquisite work, they will mainly pass unrecognized or enjoy only a short taste of recognition. Only a small percentage of painters will watch their work rise in value over time, and it is crucial when spending a large amount of money mainly for the reason of commercial investment that the correct information is obtained.

Such artists are far and few between and it is essential not to be influenced by a retail outlet that wishes to sell a certain artist’s work, or eqally important, not to be pushed into buying because a shop does not or is not able topurchase such work, that it is of little importance compared to the work being displayed in the shop. Often this is because many retail outlets are tied into arrangements with publishers, who require only their publications to be sold, even if the artists are well known or unheard of. Also it is because the paintings and signed prints by renowned artists are so sought after that it is often hard to obtain original paintings because of scarcity and ever increasing costs.

Contemporary paintings create much interest, but usually seems to fade as quickly as it has appeared, and sometimes the depreciation can be colossal. From a financial angle, it is generally best to keep with the most well known names that have an excellent history. Artists that have had many sucessful exhibitions in prestigeous galleries across the country, and that have been widely commended and the media.

There will always be an element of the latest fashion involved with picking the right style of paintings. The idea is to choose the paintings just before it evolves into the next best thing to ‘sliced bread’. This can be noticed in many small ways, the fashion in design give hints of what will be the most exciting thing of tomorrow.

Sometimes, we see a move towards retro. This is usually a passing fashion, a stopgap, as the art world changes direction. It should be given some serious thought that in tough times of hardship , as we have seen over the last year or two, that the high end of the art world actually sees a good growth, due to the lack of commercial confidence in financial institutions.

A painting by a well known British artist, purchased by the Football Association six years ago for just under two million pounds, was recently valued at six to ten million should it go under the hammer today. An amazing percentage increase in these financially difficult times, which goes to prove the solidity and viability of investing in art.

An expensive art work is what an inexpensive print or poster could become if you are able to select for it just the right framing selections. When you select mat color make sure that they enhance your art. A good choice if you want it to pick up a color from the image is to go for a double or triple mat. For the bottom mats get them in color but stick to neutral ones for the top. A sense of dimension results when double and triple mats are used in framing.

As well as the width of the frame you should also consider the size of the piece when you want to determine the mat width. Width for the mat and frame should be different. Detracting from the image is a striped appearance that is formed. One half inch is how long the bottom mat of a double mat should at least extend to. Usually mats look better when all of their sides have the same width.

You may have some floating prints and images that have deckled edges. For a floating image it is hinged to the front of your mat board. Borders are created around images when there are mat boards. Acceptable is not placing a print with deckled edges on the center of a mat especially if it is uneven. Taking into consideration that there is nothing distinctive about the edges then the mat can be cut and the pieces placed over the edges of the print.

When it comes to framing photographs it is not that simple. What works well for formal pictures like wedding photographs and portraits are ornate wood frames in silver, gold and a variety of natural finishes but simple wood or metal frames in black or silver or with light natural wood frames are ideal when it comes to art photographs especially ones in black and white. Gold finished or cherry wood frames, for instance, compete with the grays in black and white photographs.

Ornate frames compliment antique photographs. For old black and white photos silver frames are great to use. Complementing sepia prints are antiqued gold finished frames and wooden frames in ebony walnut, cherry, and mahogany. When it comes to portraits and landscapes and other traditional paintings ornate mouldings and fabric liners work well. Refrain from using liners and opt for simple frames for contemporary paintings.

Besides prints, posters, photographs, and paintings framing can be used elsewhere. What could be framed are political buttons, old letters and postcards, fabrics, theater tickets, christening dresses that you may want to hang at home or in the office. The minimalist look applies to gallery style framing. Other than matte black wooden frames ones with natural finishes are also used here.

These frames come with straight edges and absolutely no ornamentation. For the thick mats used for gallery style framing they come in 8 ply and with various shades of white. With an image only measuring 3 by 5 inches, the mats that could be used for it can be around 5 inches. When it comes to the heavy mats these draw the viewer’s eye into the image and make it look like the piece is important.

Remaining popular especially for antique furnishings and reproductions are ornate wooden frames. The magnificent mood in the 1980s is represented by high sheen silver and gold frames while the reserved spirit of the 1990s comes through with antiqued silver and gold frames. Much different are the industrial metal frames compared to the metal frames from the past. They feature brushed finishes with cross hatching, and are wider and have cleaner lines than their ancestors. In the same way as earlier metal frames, these are the most economical framing choices.

When it comes to famous photographers they have been able to bring back art photography while restoration services are to thank for making it popular to restore and frame your family’s own antique photographs. As time passes the value of antique posters increase and although they are expensive to frame they are still less expensive when compared to many original artworks. What these are great for are people with spare wall space and the loft dwellers.